Traditional online crime-mapping services may obtain most of their crime data in one of two ways—by either subscribing to a crime-reporting service, or by mining the contents of digitalized crime reports provided by law enforcement agencies. The crime reports obtained in either process may be inconsistent, incomplete, or irrelevant. In addition, some crime-mapping services may provide little information about other emergencies, such as fires, car accidents, medical emergencies, etc. Finally, scaling traditional crime-mapping services to new areas may be a slow, tedious process.
Crime data taken from crime reports may be inconsistent, incomplete, or irrelevant for a variety of reasons. For example, each law enforcement agency may have different standards for reporting crime. This may make it difficult to compare the crime reports of one agency with the crime reports of another. Not every law enforcement agency releases their crime reports, and some agencies may not release data about a crime until the case is closed, which may take months or years. Other agencies may choose to withhold crimes of a sensitive nature. In some cases, each law enforcement agency may choose to release their crime reports at different intervals—one agency may release their reports every 24 hours, another once a week.
Traditional crime mapping services may also obtain crime data from other sources, such as news outlets. This may be a time-consuming and tedious way to find crime data. Other services may scrape data from existing crime-mapping services. This may be less time-consuming, but the data may be as unreliable as data from crime reports.
In addition to these problems, traditional methods of obtaining crime data may be difficult to scale. Contacting each law enforcement agency in a new area may be costly and time consuming. Obtaining crime reports may be complex and tedious, and growing to new areas may increase this complexity.
All of the above problems may make it difficult to provide consistent, complete, or relevant safety information to users. What is needed, therefore, is a more efficient and effective mechanism for obtaining and using information about crimes and other emergencies.